Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/43

 deep-dish pies. But an undertaker's! Really, I had no desire to pose for Madame Toussaud's dead-uns. At the same time, no dog-gone friend of mine would die, giving me the chance to bury him at my expense. Running away from that fried-fish smell, I always felt like Henry the Eighth, when one of his half-dozen queens wouldn't be introduced to the axe-man. Indeed, if that starving undertaker had been my own best enemy, I couldn't have felt more sorry for him. But lo!—the silver lining to the cloud! One evening, as I approached the carcassery, my startled ears were assailed by that quaint ditty:

and, leaping forward like oiled lightning, I saw the undertaker at work in the rear of the shop.

"'Bless me, if the ban isn't broke,' I thought, 'and with this dent in the armor. Fate will waltz up plenty more diseased ones. It's always thus.'

"Suiting my action to the classic monologue—'thus' is a beautiful word, isn't it?—I peered through the side window, expecting the janitor of tenements-of-clay to be at work on a nine-foot coffin or thereabout—"

All the merriment fled from Mark Twain's face and manner when he added: "Damme, if that God-forsaken corpse-slinger was not planing a baby coffin!

"That night I took three Scotch, and" (looking around) "I don't care if Livy knows." 39